Picking stations are essential components of high volume distribution and fulfillment operations. For years, the usual method of order picking was a solution that required an order picker to take an order list, walk through racks of products filled with containers of products to pick from, picking the listed products from product containers, and placing the picked products into an order container for delivery to packaging. This solution has some downfalls: it is slow, requires intensive manpower, and is costly.
In the simplest form, an order picking system may be a pair of parallel roller conveyors, one with product totes to pick from, and one with order totes for placing the picked articles into. Early systems were heavily depended on the skills of the picker to correctly pick and place the correct quantities of articles into the correct order container and may have required manual movement of both product and order totes on the conveyors. While faster than walking rack aisles, the process was still time consuming and depended heavily on the skills of the picker or operator to correctly match picked articles with order totes.
Automating the picking process can reduce time, manpower, and costs. An automated system can bring the product containers to the picker for picking, return the product containers to storage, and deliver the filled orders to packing and shipping.
More recent order picking systems have become more robotic and automatically delivered the correct product totes sequentially to an operator standing at an order picking station for order picking. Depending on the overall robotic warehouse system design and particularly on the order picking station design, some systems deliver product containers to the operator faster than others. Time motion studies have indicated that many operators can pick faster than the order picking station can deliver, and that many of the time delays are inherent in the design of the order picking station.
Consequently, a significant need exists for an order picking station, or goods to operator station that can operate at speeds as fast or faster than the picker. Such a system would reduce order costs, deliver orders to the customer faster, and reduce the manpower involved.